Open/Close Scheduling

Open/close supervision watches whether a premises arms and disarms when it should. The schedule states the expected pattern; the panel's open and close signals are compared against it; the differences — a missed close, an early open — become the alarms an operator sees. The schedule lives on the Open/Close Schedule tab of Service/Data Entry (#559) and binds to zones through the zone's Sched# (the Zones module); the resulting events land in the Open/Close Log, and the Open/Close Status tab answers "is the site open right now?" by passcard.

How the module progresses

1. Read an installation's schedules and how a zone binds to one.
2. Create a weekly schedule.
3. Decide which surprises become alarms — the six exceptions.
4. Change a single day — temporary changes, holidays and special days.
5. Cover a stretch of dates — special periods and the composite view.
6. Read the Open/Close Log.
7. Answer "is the site open?" from a passcard.

1. Read an installation's schedules

Task: list an installation's schedules and say which zone reports against which schedule.

Up to 32 schedules per installation. The Open/Close Schedule tab lists them; Get Record [ALT+F1] opens the schedule screen with its four sections — the schedule grid (the weekly pattern, up to 20 lines), the exceptions boxes, the holidays and special days grids, and the special periods tabs. A schedule does nothing until a zone names it: the zone's Sched# column is the binding, so one installation can supervise the office on schedule 1 and the warehouse on schedule 2.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): open TMPL-COMM's Open/Close Schedule tab and Get its schedule; name the four sections and read the weekly pattern aloud. Then open its Zones tab and find which zone carries the Sched#.

Guided practice: on your own commercial installation, state which zone will report against the schedule you are about to create — and why an open/close zone type generates opens and closes instead of alarms (recall the Zones module's generation flags).

Independent practice: a customer has offices and a vault with different hours. Sketch which schedules exist, which zone binds to which, and what stays unsupervised if the vault zone's Sched# is blank.

2. Create a weekly schedule

Task: enter a weekly open/close schedule and bind it to the installation's open/close zone.

The grid is the week. New [F3] opens the schedule screen; double-click into the grid cells to enter days and the open and close times. The grid starts with one line and grows as you complete each — a line per distinct pattern (weekdays one line, Saturday another). The Open/Close range fields give the tolerance in minutes around each scheduled time — four digits, negative allowed, so a close range of 0 to −120 accepts a close up to two hours early.

Two safeguards live here. Dual Authority requires two passcard holders, within four hours, to change the schedule. User Numbers requires a user number on every opening — the panel must say who disarmed.

Steps:

1. Open the installation, Open/Close Schedule tab, New [F3].
2. Enter the weekly lines in the grid.
3. Set the open/close ranges.
4. Tick the exceptions the schedule should report (section 3).
5. Save [ENTER] — then set the open/close zone's Sched# to this schedule in the Zones tab.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): on your commercial installation, create schedule 1: Monday–Friday open 08:00, close 18:00, a 15-minute range both ways — and bind your open/close zone to it.

Guided practice: add a Saturday line, open 09:00 close 13:00, and explain why it is a second grid line and not a second schedule.

Independent practice: the customer closes at 21:00 on Thursdays and is shut on Sundays. Extend your schedule to express that, and state for each day of the week what SBN now expects and when.

3. Decide which surprises become alarms — the six exceptions

Task: predict, for any open or close event, which exception fires — and configure only the ones the customer wants to hear about.

Six check boxes. An exception compares what happened against what the schedule expected:

A ticked box means the event generates an alarm; an unticked box means it is only logged. The boxes on the schedule are the default — each grid line can override them with a + (report) or - (do not report) in that line's exception cells, blank meaning "follow the schedule's boxes".

Exceptions arrive as system signals. A missed close is not a zone tripping — SBN generates the signal itself, and the system-zone mechanism from the Zones module (with zone/area routing) decides which action plan treats it.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): on your schedule, the customer wants to know when closing is missed or late: tick MC and LC, leave the open-side boxes clear. Say aloud what tonight looks like if the site never closes.

Guided practice: for each event, name the exception (or none): close at 17:00 against your 18:00 ± 15 close · open at 07:30 against 08:00 ± 15 · no open all day Monday · a close at 18:05.

Independent practice: the customer says "Saturdays we sometimes stay late — don't alarm on that, but weekdays yes." Express it with per-line overrides rather than a second schedule, and defend the blank cells.

4. Change a single day — temporary changes, holidays, special days

Task: make one date behave differently without touching the weekly pattern.

Temporary Schedule Change [SHIFT+F2] is the one-day tool: pick the date, enter that day's times, done. The exceptions chosen in the temporary window override the schedule's own for that day.

Holidays and special days are the planned one-day changes — up to 50 per schedule. First define the special pattern as a schedule line (a "special schedule"); then either pick a holiday from the menu (holidays are defined in Scheduled Holidays #1746 and dated in the Holiday Calendar #1747) or pick a calendar date for a company-specific special day, and point it at the special schedule. Every year the holiday recurs, the special hours apply — no yearly maintenance.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): enter a temporary schedule change for tomorrow on your commercial installation — open 10:00, close 16:00 — and read back what the composite view will show tomorrow.

Guided practice: give your schedule a holiday row: pick a seeded holiday, point it at a closed-all-day special schedule, and explain what happens if the panel opens anyway that morning.

Independent practice: inventory day is the last Friday of next month, hours 06:00–20:00. Decide temporary change vs special day vs holiday, set it up, and justify the choice in one sentence.

5. Cover a stretch of dates — special periods and the composite view

Task: apply different hours to a whole date range, and read the composite view to know which schedule is running now.

Special periods are date ranges with their own schedule grid — twelve tabs, each labelled Unassigned until you give it a range. Extended seasonal hours (the December shopping weeks, the summer slowdown) live here rather than as fifty special days.

The composite view [F6] shows the currently running schedule on the left (its number highlighted); after a temporary change, the superseded schedule moves to the right panel. The Line Index encodes where a line came from — 1 is the normal grid; 201 is special-period tab 2, line 1 — so you can trace any running line back to the tab that produced it.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): on your commercial installation, define special period 1 for the next two weeks with open 07:00 close 19:00, then open the composite view and find the line, reading its Line Index back to the tab.

Guided practice: with your temporary change from section 4 still set for tomorrow, predict what the composite view shows tomorrow morning — which line runs, and where did the normal line go?

Independent practice: the customer's "summer hours" run six weeks and their "stocktake week" sits inside them with different hours again. Lay out which tabs hold what, and which line the composite will show in stocktake week.

6. Read the Open/Close Log

Task: reconstruct from the log what happened, what was expected, and whether it alarmed.

One row per open/close event. The O/C Log tab shows, per row: day, date and time (in operator or premises time — the Data Entry Master toggle switches), the zone and its Schedule #, the Type (Open, Close, or Change), what SBN expected (Missing or Log-Only), an Alarm X when the event raised an alarm, and the user number the panel reported — who disarmed. Schedule Date/Time hold when the event was supposed to happen, with M/A flagging manual schedule edits, and a Manual X marks rows whose date/time were entered by hand. On multi-CID installations, Backup CID names the reporting CID: . the first, 2–9 the second through ninth, X the tenth.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): open the O/C Log on your commercial installation and walk the columns left to right, saying what each will contain once open/close signals flow.

Guided practice: describe the exact row — Type, Expect, Alarm, Schedule Time — that appears if tonight's 18:00 close never happens, given your section 3 exceptions.

Independent practice: the customer disputes a late-open charge: "we opened at 08:10, well inside the range." Name the columns that settle it and the two time zones the timestamps might be in.

7. Answer "is the site open?" from a passcard

Task: find the open/close state of every site a passcard holder covers.

Search by passcard. The Open/Close Status tab starts empty; enter a passcard number (and extension) and Search [F3]. The results list the zones attached to the holder's installations — only installations whose passcards are downloadable are included. The All box widens the net: unticked, you get only zones currently in the Alarm Queue, the Test Queue, or Open status; ticked, every zone. From a result row, Get Installation from List [F2] loads the installation into Data Entry, and Zoom Zone [F6] opens the zone's details.

Worked example (Branch TRAIN): search with your own passcard from the Action Plans module, All unticked — read what qualifies a zone into this shorter list — then repeat with All ticked and compare.

Guided practice: from a result row on your commercial installation, jump with [F2] and confirm you landed on the right installation, then come back and zoom the zone.

Independent practice: a key-holder phones: "did I close both my sites?" Walk the exact search, say what an Open row proves, and name the reason a site of theirs might be missing from the results entirely.

8. Quick reference

Exceptions: MO/EO/LO on the open side, MC/EC/LC on the close side — ticked = alarms, unticked = logged; per-line +/- overrides beat the schedule's boxes; temporary-change exceptions beat both for that day.

One-liners: a schedule supervises nothing until a zone's Sched# names it · 32 schedules, 20 grid lines, 50 holiday/special-day rows, 12 special-period tabs · ranges are minutes, negative allowed · composite Line Index: 1 = normal grid, 201 = special tab 2 line 1 · exceptions arrive as system-generated signals routed via system zones · O/C Status includes downloadable passcards only; All widens beyond queue/open zones.